Ah, the mind-body problem. As regular readers of this blog may know, it has kept my mind twirling for decades. Sometimes I'm a dualist interactionist, something like Descartes but with aspirations to empiricism. Sometimes I'm an emergentist, seeing mind as something on an ontological level higher than mindless life, as life is on a higher level than lifeless chemistry. Sometimes, I'm a vitalist, seeing life -- even insect life -- as inherently mindful. Sometimes I believe in the earthsoul of which we are all expressions. Relatedly: sometimes, I am a panpsychic, finding mindfulness everywhere, not merely in life, even in the rocks. These four (or five) views have seemed very different from each other, and I haven't been able to reconcile them to my own satisfaction. Now I believe I have achieved a reflective equilibrium. Happy day. I'm an emergentist, and specifically one who embraces downward causation and a planetary mereology. Huh? Well...
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My recent reading includes a book entitled I AM NOT A BRAIN by Markus Gabriel, a prominent German philosopher who sometimes calls himself a neo-existentialist. I mentioned Gabriel's unorthodox view of 19th century Germany idealism in a post here last week. Today I wish to add only that the title of I AM NOT A BRAIN makes transparent one of its theses: that it is impossible to reduce the mind to facts about the brain or nervous system in the Dennett manner. He also debelieves in a transcendental soul, which works somehow within the otherwise mechanical human body. He acknowledges of course that the activity of the brain is a necessary condition for the activity of the mind. But he thinks it never a sufficient condition for understanding consciousness, or self-consciousness, or the self, or freedom. So far so good. But he seems to argue for this in a roundabout and very 'continental' way that makes me suspect this is all supposed to unclog my overly burdened angl...
I'm thinking just now, for no good reason, of the book Arthur Lovejoy wrote, published by George Allen & Unwin Ltd. back in 1930, The Revolt Against Dualism. Although written as a historical inquiry, the point of the book is to lead us to a substantive philosophical conclusion: revolts against dualism have failed because they must fail, because dualism is an enduring fact about the world and our place therein. Efforts to deny that fact collapse. The book is, then, analogous to Lovejoy's better known work, The Great Chain of Being. In both cases, Lovejoy treats us to a chronological discussion of an idea that, in his view, has failed in fact because it of necessity must fail, and thus an idea we as a species would be wise to abandon. Chain discussed an idea in macro-chronological terms, as millennia passed. But Revolt was a very micro-chronological history. It focused on the 30 year period prior to publication. Anyway: if you're still reading at ...
Might as well push my luck, and apply this six-point template again. 1) In anthropology, Aristotle dissented from Plato's dualism, treating the human soul as the form of the human body. 2) In metaphysics, he is remembered for a modified realism about universals. He held that appleness is one and the same fact whether I am speaking of this apple or that apple. BUT he denied that appleness is a fact metaphysically separate from any and all of the particular apples. 3) In epistemology, Aristotle added a note of empiricism to his teacher's critical rationalism. He sought for example to collect what was known about living organisms in his day before drawing conclusions about life processes. 4) In ethics, Aristotle believed that the virtuous man (the great-souled man) will do what is right. The task of ethics is neither laying down duties or deliberating over consequences, but cultivating virtue. 5) In politics, Aristotle believed that the best city is likely to be ...
Just to practice concision. 1) In anthropology, Plato was the first of the great dualists. He emphasized the sharp distinction between a physical man and the real eternal man. 2) In metaphysics, Plato is remembered for his clear statement of the realist position on universals. A concept such as "justice" or "beauty" is not merely a notion inside someone's mind, nor is it merely a resemblance between the different acts we call just, the different objects we consider beautiful;, etc. It is more than that. The Idea or Form of Justice is a reality, one of the supreme realities, and specific examples are real by virtue of their participation in their universals, not vice versa. 3. In epistemology, Plato believed in critical rationalism. The way to approach truth is to begin with someone's naïve notions and cross-examine them ruthlessly. A philosopher thus becomes a midwife to a truth that will come out of others. (Those unlucky enough to run into him in ...
"The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance...." I don't know German, so of course I have no idea what the original passage as Kant composed it would sound or feel like to someone who does. But Kant's prose has a reputation for, um, Teutonic heaviness. Yet unless his translators have given him a huge gift, this passage shows that he had a light poetic side. It seems to me to speak with great concision to the similarity/difference of Kant and Plato. They are both philosophers who distinguish between the apparently (or provisionally) real world on the one hand and the really real world on the oth...
Two days ago (as you reckon time, oh real-time reader of these prepared-for-vacation notes) I said that I am thinking of writing something about the historiography of the Holocaust. Somewhat related to that ambition: I see that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a very high-profile social scientist, formerly an associate professor of political science at Harvard, has a new book out called The Devil That Never Dies. From what I've heard it is not so much as history as a work of personal meditation on the past, present, and future of anti-Semitism. It is also the object of a very sharply worded critique in the September 13th WALL STREET JOURNAL by Anthony Julius. Julius says that he is himself of Goldhagen's "party," that is, anti-anti-Semitism, but ... to do the good work of that party one has to be a "smart, truth-telling" participant in the "terrible struggle" against the enemies of the Jews. And this, Goldhagen is not. I shouldn't comment ...
Here's a link to a philosophical defense of old-fashioned interactionist dualism , dated 2006 and submitted by a candidate for an M.A. in philosophy at Monash University. I'll come to Koksvik's argument in another post, but for now I'll review my understanding of the state of play. Interactionist dualism was famously Rene Descartes ' answer to the question of the relationship between mind and body . There exist a lot of different possible answers to this question, from the materialist reductionism that says in essence that the 'mind' is an illusion, to the Berkeleyan idealism that says in essence that the 'body' is an illusion. Dualists all by definition say that mind and body are very different things or types of thing, and that they are both real. Dualists differ among themselves on whether the mind and body really interact. They certainly SEEM to interact! If I skip lunch, the thought "I'm hungry" will be in m...